Samuel Hynes served as a consultant on The War, directed and produced
by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, and appears on camera in several
episodes.
The War is a seven-part, 14-hour documentary series that debuts on PBS
on Sunday, September 23, 2007.
Sam Hynes was eighteen when he left his Minnesota home for navy flight
school in 1943. By the time the war ended he was a veteran Marine pilot,
still not quite twenty-one, and had flown more than a hundred missions
in the Pacific theater. In this eloquent narrative, by turns dramatic,
funny, and elegiac, Hynes recalls those extraordinary years during which
he came of age. he makes real the places--the training fields and the
liberty towns and the Pacific islands, and the people--the other young
pilots, the girls and the young wives, even the enemy pilots. He
remembers friendship, and the excitement and tedium of war, the high
exhilaration of flying, and the dying. More than a tale of combat,
Flight of Passage is a story of one boy's growth to manhood in the
turbulent, testing world of war in the air.